The bottom line: In this letter submitted to my college’s “journal of social and political thought”, I reflect on its role in socializing students into the technocratic mores and norms of the ruling class. I particularly insinuate that writing and reading such journals becomes the limiting form of politics in such an impoverished worldview. [Particulars have been changed.]
[The man of letters has] a higher aim,– to enlighten, instruct, improve. It is his duty to assert boldly the right, to thrust himself into the breach for the defence of attacked principles, to disregard the reeking breath of popular applause, to rebuke fearlessly and openly the unbridled licence of rabble violence, and on the other hand to arouse the popular mind to a just enthusiasm for all that is great, lovely, and true, to a just sense of right, and duty. . . “Men of Letters”, The Investigator, February 1849, page 219.
The Investigator is but one of many sequalae of the septic socio-logic that constitutes, materially and symbolically, the social arrangement of a ________ education. It is a pedagogical tool, an instrument of inculcation (and at the same time the expression of its success ) that elaborates the subconscious conditio sine qua non of the College itself: the anti-democratic idea that polity and society is best dictated by an elite minority.
The Investigator is one didactic mechanism among many at _______ that functions to create in us the dispositions accompanying our inevitable positions as ‘knowledge workers’, ‘symbolic manipulators’ (or whatever terms the right and its newly resurgent Clintonesque flatterer, the Attisian Obama left, toss about to obscure and obfuscate the true socioeconomic condition of the middle classes in an age of regnant hypertrophic capital), ideologists, technocrats, crapademics, managers, ‘social entrepreneurs’ , philanthropists, and other ‘pillars of the community’ (our distribution within which is largely an effect of sociobiography, such that the academically talented petit bourgeois ‘ascend’ to the professoriate, or, if less talented or more sentimentalist, to posts in the ‘helping professions’; the academically ungifted bourgeois go on to serve in the neocolonial paternalism of organizations like Teach for America, or apply to second-tier professional graduate programs; the feudal ‘second sons’ of the rich land in NGOs, while their more successful peers move directly into business if not finance; and the working class or lower caste often back home for a while and take a series of dead-end jobs until they can figure out which one of these options they want to commit to). Specifically, the uniting idea, or better, ideology (because most powerful when remaining unrecognized as such) that the College strives to bestow upon its students is that they are special and that they not only know better than the rest, but that they know best for the rest. The Investigator is one of many mechanisms of the implicit curriculum of our College that socializes us (the few of us that need conversion—the valuation of a ‘liberal arts education’ at an ‘elite private college’, itself obviously a prerequisite for admission, is but a bastard bastion of the reproduction of classism in a ‘meritocratic’ era in which the naked reproduction of class must be disguised as such) into our roles as the leaders, makers, movers, and shakers of the next generation. Ochlomisia is instilled with narcissism in the alembic of our technocratic initiation.
In short, this magazine represents and reinforces the idea that we are smart, we know how to run shit better than others, and that that takes the form of ‘rational’ debate, monographic and monochromatic writing, and management from the summit of steep inequalities of knowledge and power.
This demophobic presumption characterizes all contributions and contributors to The Investigator, whether liberal or conservative (but oh, for the wit of another Montana!), Jew or Gentile (how fucking many partial and partisan articles on Israel / Palestine does one campus need, that they even spill over into the venerable Student!), proVagMo or misogynist, Doc Benway or SHE, as writing comes to be seen as the limit form of political action and intellectual exercise. To formulate an argument, write it up, and submit it to be published; to subscribe to the vanity that your thoughts are special and unique (if not witty and penetrating), and to be confident that they will be heard, heeded, and in some way acted upon, is to exhibit the conceit that our schooling creates in our politics: that we dispense knowledge from on high, forming and informing lesser mortals. Our socialization into this manner of acting on the world (we ever kneel at the Baal of ‘social and political thought’ rigidly divorced from action or practice, thanks to a reactionary registrar, a castrated center for community engagement, sociopolitically withdrawn faculty, a mandarin administration, and our own self-importance) is the corollary to our abstract and abstracting vision of it. The editorial is but the most pure artifact produced by institutions and habitus that encourage the confusion and conflation of thought, opinion, and fact; the infusion and inflation of egoism and solipsism; and the illusionary illation of ‘true’ (because abstract and idealist) understanding of the social world. The perpetual puzzlement of Student staff at the relative popularity of its rival is parochial; the fact is easily explained by the simple truth that reading, writing, and responding to no-stakes, glitzy, faux-academicist editorials is training and preparation for _______ students’ inevitable futures. Objective reporting (talis quails on this campus) is just so. . . pleb, and the academic trajectories of the staff of both publications will show this.
The indispensible and characteristic effect that elite colleges bestow upon their charges through that magical artifact, the degree (and the years of mandatory residence and indoctrination leading up to it) is not only the illusion of impersonal competence and technical qualification, but also the illusion of personal merit and just desert. _______ is not only an entitled place, but an entitling one, flattering students that they possess and manipulate a rarified knowledge that will save the poor and needy, if liberal (never realizing, of course, that that mentality is the product of the same social process and political-economic arrangement which produce those categories of the population) or that will prove their superiority to the poor and needy, if conservative. This is the elitism of technocracy; this is the substance and substrate of an _______ education.
The College (of which the Investigator, formal classes, limited, incremental, and accommodationist service opportunities, dorm culture, narrowly self-interested clubs, and bourgeois forms of political action and consciousness-building are but some of the more self-evident techniques) equips us with the affective and effective tastes and talents necessary to act on the world rather than in it. We are taught to disdain ‘the masses’ and participatory democracy as strictly and dispassionately as we are segregated from them. The institution reifies expertise over experience, management over involvement, and a consecrated elite over alien others.
If I can accomplish anything by this hypocritical collaboration** in the forces that I describe, I hope that it may be in putting the atrophied view of politics that I decry to work by causing one student or staff member, next time they see our seal or hear an intonation—or invocation—of the school’s motto, to consider just who is lighting the world, with what, and why (and to consider what dark, agencyless, and pitiful forms this necessarily implies).
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** I am very aware of the discrepancy that I evince by writing to the same journal. It was not a decision that I came by easily, and it is without justification or resolution. In the final analysis, I have to come to terms with the fact that I’m not above or outside of what I describe– indeed, my participation and especially its form (e.g. the language that I find it ‘natural’ to write in, despite the fact that it so clearly borrows outright from one or two authors) are testament to my collusion and collaboration in the (re)production of privilege and distinction.
Works consulted: Bourdieu and Passeron’s Reproduction and Lemann’s The Big Test.
